AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Internet archive5/1/2023 ![]() One of those adaptations is humming right behind me. “So we thought, ‘Why don't we just take it slow and we'll have the building adapt to us and we'll adapt to the building?’” “So we thought when we bought this place that we would flatten the floor and make it into a library, but exactly what a library looks like or is like in the future, we don't know,” says Kahle. The floor is sloped like an amphitheater. There are real pews in here, arranged in a wide half-circle facing an altar. We’re in a cavernous room lit by daylight streaming in through big, stained-glass windows. But the first thing I see is a full-on church. He pays for all of this with money he earned early in his tech career, and from foundations.Īs Kahle leads us up to the second floor, I can hear the faint hum of hard drives. Kahle and a team of more than 50 engineers, programmers, archivists and volunteers are doing that right in this building. “And it turns out,” Kahle says, “technologically, you can do it.” The Internet Archive is trying to prevent this from ever happening. Nowadays, that would be like if we lost all of Shakespeare, or you could never watch The Wire again. That’s when it burned and everything inside was destroyed. It’s said to have housed every book – or scroll, I should say – ever written, up until the first century, BC. It was one of the biggest and most important libraries of the ancient world. The library of Alexandria, version one, was in Egypt. “The idea was to try to build the library of Alexandria, version two,” explains Kahle. Kahle is leading me and about 15 other people on a tour of this old church, which now houses the gigantic internet project he founded 20 years ago, the Internet Archive. “We bought this building because it matched our logo,” Kahle says. That’s a happy coincidence, according to Brewster Kahle. Come to think of it, it actually looks a lot like the building I just stepped inside. The first thing I see when I open the doors is a black doormat with a white image of what looks like a Roman temple. ![]() ![]() There are big white columns out front, with pink steps leading up to iron double doors.īut what goes on inside this church is not quite what you’d expect. Many institutions - such as the California Digital Library, The Royal Society, and University of Toronto Libraries - have done so and so have openly licensed digital copies on the site.In San Francisco’s Richmond District, where Geary Boulevard meets Park Presidio, there stands a bright, white, defunct Christian Science church. There is a default general non-commercial "Terms of Use" statement in operation in the site but it is overridden should the institution, digitising sponsor, or individual uploader make a statement to the contrary on the site. ![]() Many institutions from all over the world use the Internet Archive to house and provide access to their material. Highlights include the Prelinger Archives, a fantastic collection of ephemeral and public service films on a huge range of topics, from how to be popular to surviving a nuclear attack, and a great collection of 78rpm records and cylinder recordings. The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." A vast majority of the content on The Public Domain Review is sourced from its enormous archives of books, films and audio material. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |